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A Word to the Reader

In the Priapieia sive diversorum poetarum in Priapum Lusus, the friend
with whom I have the pleasure to collaborate has come upon 'treasure trove', in
the shape of a sprightly Latin cento of humour peculiarly Italic, most
interesting to anthropologists and humanists and--rarer merit--undeflowered by
the translator. He has made the most of his trouvaille providing the
booklet with a history and a bibliography and illustrating, in copious notes and
excursus, the Priapic cult and the manners and customs of the Roman days so
quaintly depicted in these old (monkish?) pages. In brief, he has monopolised
the learned and literary side of the epigrams, and he has assumed the whole
responsibility thereof.

My share of the labour is on a scale much humbler. A 'cute French publisher
lately remarked to me that, as a rule, versions in verse are as enjoyable to the
writer as they are unenjoyed by the reader, who vehemently doubts their truth
and trustworthiness. These pages hold in view one object sole and simple, namely
to prove that a translation, metrical and literal, may be true and may be
trustworthy.

As Captain Burton has told the public (CamoŽns: Life and Lusiads; ii,
185-98), it has ever been his ambition to reverse the late Mr Matthew Arnold's
peremptory dictum: 'In a verse translation no original work is any longer
recognisable.' And here I may be allowed to borrow from the same writer's
Supplemental Arabian Nights, vol vi, appendix pages 411-12 (a book known to few
and never to be reprinted), his vision of the ideal translation which should not
be relegated to the Limbus of Intentions.

My estimate of a translator's office has never been of the low level
generally assigned to it, even in the days when Englishmen were in the
habit of translating every work, interesting or important, published out
of England, and of thus giving a continental and cosmopolitan flavour to
their literature. We cannot at this period expect much from a 'man of
letters' who must produce a monthly volume for a pittance of £20; of him
we need not speak. But the translator at his best, works, when
reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, upon two distinct
lines. His prime and primary object is to please his reader, edifying
him and gratifying his taste; the second is to produce an honest and
faithful copy, adding naught to the sense or abating aught of its
especial cachet. He has, however, or should have, another aim
wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can
profitably lend something to and take somewhat from its neighbours--an
epithet, a metaphor, a naive idiom, a turn of phrase. And the translator
of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone, manner and
complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his
mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall justly be
accounted barbarisms until formally naturalised and adopted. Nor will
any modern versionist relegate to a footnote, as is the malpractice of
his banal brotherhood, the striking and often startling phases of the
foreign author's phraseology and dull the text with well-worn and
commonplace English equivalents, thus doing the clean reverse of what he
should do. It was this beau idťal of a translator's success which
made Eustache Deschamps write of his contemporary and brother bard,
'Grand Translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier'. Here 'the firste finder of
our fair language' is styled 'a Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in
morals, an Angel in conduct and a great Translator'--a seeming
anti-climax which has scandalised not a little sundry inditers of
'Lives' and 'Memoirs'. The title is no bathos; it is given simply
because Chaucer translated (using the term in its best and
highest sense) into his pure, simple and strong English tongue, with all
its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and fancies of his foreign
models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccaccio.

For the humble literary status of translation in modern England and for the
shortcomings of the average English translator, public taste or rather caprice
is mainly to be blamed. The 'general reader', the man not in the street but the
man who makes up the educated mass, greatly relishes a novelty in the way of
'plot' or story or catastrophe, while he has a natural dislike of novelties of
style and diction, demanding a certain dilution of the unfamiliar with the
familiar. Hence our translations in verse, especially when rhymed, become for
the most part deflorations or excerpts, adaptations or periphrases, more or less
meritorious, and the 'translator' has been justly enough dubbed 'traitor' by
critics of the severer sort. And he amply deserves the injurious name when
ignorance of his original's language perforce makes him pander to popular
prescription.

But the good time which has long been coming seems now to have come. The home
reader will no longer put up with the careless caricatures of classical chefs
d'oeuvre which satisfied his old-fashioned predecessor. Our youngers, in
most points our seniors, now expect the translation not only to interpret the
sense of the original but also, when the text lends itself to such treatment, to
render it verbatim et literatim, nothing being increased or diminished,
curtailed or expanded. More over, in the choicer passages, they so far require
an echo of the original music that its melody and harmony should be suggested to
their mind. Welcomed also are the mannerisms of the translator's model, as far
as these aid in preserving, under the disguise of another dialect, the
individuality of the foreigner and his peculiar costume.

'Mat this high ideal of translation Is at length becoming popular now appears
in our literature. The Villon Society, when advertising the novels of Matteo
Bandello, Bishop of Agen, justly remarks of the translator, Mr John Payne, that
his previous works have proved him to possess special qualifications for 'the
delicate and difficult task of transferring into his own language at once the
savour and the substance, the matter and the manner of works of the highest
individuality, conceived and executed in a foreign language'.

In my version of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the metre,
although it is strangely out of favour in English literature, while we read it
and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion; the
rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and Latin and
the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly to be supplied by art and artifice.

And now it is time for farewelling my friends.
We may no longer (alas!) address them with the
ingenuous ancient imperative, Nunc plaudite!